My little girls seem to just love rainbows these days and when my soon to be 5 year old asked to have a rainbow mermaid themed birthday party, I jumped at the chance to make rainbow cupcakes! I also made rainbow cookies and mermaid cookies too!

The birthday party guests loved these cupcakes and a lot of them chose to eat these over the actual birthday cake, but I must admit…….they were a bit tedious to make! Everything was fine until the point where I had to add each layer of colored batter. I wanted to make sure that each color was distributed evenly so I took my time. However, the batter spreads so you don’t need to be quite as precise as I tried to be. Lol.

Looks like fun homemade paint, doesn't it?

Baked up, nice and colorful!

I was hoping to make white cake batter from scratch, but ran out of time so I used a box of white cake mix for these cupcakes. To make rainbow cupcakes, simply mix up some white cake batter, either from scratch or from the box. Next divide, the batter evenly into six small bowls. Add food coloring in each of the following colors to each bowl: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Stir until well mixed.

Divide batter evenly into prelined cupcake tins starting with purple, then blue, green, yellow, orange and lastly, red. Whenever I make boxed cake mix, I seem to always end up with only 20 cupcakes. Perhaps I fill my paper muffin cups too much? Either way, I fill them just over half full in most cases, sometimes 3/4 full and that’s probably where I go wrong.

After baking the cupcakes, let them cool before topping them with frosting! I topped off the frosting with gold sugar, because I thought it would look so pretty and as they say…….”there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow”. In this case, there are golden sprinkles on top of the rainbow!

Overall, the cupcakes ended up being fun to make and I enjoyed watching everyone have a great time devouring them.